It’s been a while since ipXchange has covered any lidar solutions, so it was great to meet Lidwave at CES 2024. In this interview, Guy chats with Yehuda Vidal, CEO of Lidwave about how his company’s solutions extend the reach of lidar beyond the typical automotive applications and allow new functionality in industrial electronics and robotics. The key differentiator with Lidwave’s technology is lidar sensing in 4D, with instantaneous pixel-level velocity measurements.
As Yehuda explains, Lidwave’s solution measures the depth/distance information on each lidar pixel, its position in the x-y image space, and the velocity of each pixel in the scene. This means that from a single detection frame, the system can predict the position of objects in a few seconds’ time using basic equations of motion – SUVAT, anyone?
This is important for many applications that benefit from predictive, active sensing. If a system can predict where a car or machine part will be in the near future, it can take action to avoid a collision, for example. This predictive perception happens at the frame level, rather than within a software stack that takes in multiple frames, performs a calculation, and subsequently takes action once it may already be too late.
Lidwave achieves this new lidar-based sensing ability with continuous lighting instead of the traditional pulsed lighting used by other lidar solutions. Additionally, since doing calculations at the nanosecond scale is far from simple – light does travel at the speed of light – Lidwave measures other properties of the reflected light that are not related to time. Lidwave’s Finite Coherent Ranging (FCR) method enables measurements of the level of coherence of the light, which provides more insight into the depth and velocity of each lidar pixel, in contrast to simply measuring the time it takes for the light pulse to return.
Using this approach, Lidwave also hopes to dramatically reduce the cost of lidar integration, while simultaneously adding a new level of functionality over traditional Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors. Traditional ToF sensors use high-power light sources that cannot be integrated with the detectors. Conversely, Lidwave uses a much lower-power light source which is suitable for integration within the same package as the detector, resulting in a much more scalable solution at the chip level.
Learn more about Lidwave’s solution by following the link below to the dedicated board page, and if you’ve got an interesting industrial project, fill out the form to get connected with Lidwave through ipXchange.
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